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People have no selves anymore (maybe they never had them in the first place) so their home base is their sex—their genitals, who they fuck.

This phrase from Molly, which occurs in Chapter 15 in conversation with Polina, constitutes one of Molly’s major criticisms of society: that people depend on their gender in order to express their most fundamental identity. Molly fears that this frame of mind leads people to view all other aspects of their lives through their gender and sexuality, and thus as secondary to those traits. Molly resists being defined by her sexuality alone, because she believes that selfhood is infinitely more complex and varied than the simple distinctions between man and woman. She notes that such simple distinctions have led to some of the greatest injustices in history and will continue to do so until society rejects such crude divisions. In her assertions, Molly moves toward a new and more humanistic understanding of people, where considerations of sex are secondary to the multiple possibilities of the self.

Molly is well aware that social institutions such as advertisers manipulate individuals by exploiting their preoccupation with sex. If considerations of sex are central to motivating human behavior, then advertisers succeed most in getting their messages across to the public by appealing to basic instincts. Molly sees this practice as a manifestation of patriarchal rule: big corporate institutions, which are governed by men, use images of scantily clad women or promises of liaisons with scantily clad women to sell their products to men, who have most of the money in the American economy. In this sense, advertising preserves patriarchal rule by objectifying women and promoting inequality.

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